Legal critics have long maintained there are too many law schools producing too many lawyers. Frank Wu, dean of UC Hastings law school, agrees with them.

Applications to the nation’s law schools have dropped about 25 percent over two years and likely will drop again this year. With student demand dropping — and other major changes, such as slowed law firm hiring — it is the responsibility of law schools to rethink the way they do business, according to Wu.

So San Francisco’s UC Hastings plans to cut the size of this year’s incoming class by 20 percent. It’s not that Hastings can’t fill the spots — the school admits only about one-quarter of its applicants.

The reduction, Wu said, is the right thing to do for the school, its students and the broader legal world.

Wu discusses his plans for Hastings, the state of the legal industry and why legal education has reached a critical juncture.

Q: In a nutshell, what are you doing at UC Hastings?

A: I’m here to reboot legal education, come up with a new paradigm, a new model. Legal education is in a crisis. It is not temporary. It’s not a blip. This is profound, permanent structural change.

Q: Hastings is cutting the size of its incoming class. Why?

A: It’s the right thing to do. There is no economic necessity to reduce the class size. As a business person it’s stupid of me to reduce class size. I just blew a $9 million hole in my budget. Who deliberately reduces their market share?

Q: Why is it the right thing to do?

A: Here’s why: I could easily fill the class, but that would be bad for society and bad for students and bad for the school. It’s bad for society because we’re overproducing lawyers. Bad for the students because we can’t pump out that many lawyers. Bad for the school because all our metrics would be horrible. It’s a question of ­— is it responsible to fill the seats?

Q: What is the state of law firm hiring?

A: Law firms are undergoing structural change (with layoffs during the Great Recession.) We, in legal education, don’t exist in a vacuum. When students pass the bar, they want to go and work. We’re not in an ivory tower.

Q: In recent years have some assumptions about legal education — that it generally leads to high salaries and career stability — been wrong?

A: The critics of legal education are right. Expectations are out of whack. People should never have had the expectation that law school guaranteed them a $165,000 job on Wall Street or in the Financial district in San Francisco.

Eric Young covers economic development, government, law and the business of sports for the San Francisco Business Times.

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